CV/ABOUT

With extensive experience in Mexico and internationally, Candiani is interested in the complex intersection between language systems, sound, and logics of technology. There is some nostalgia for the obsolete in her work, which seeks to make explicit both the discursive content of artifacts, and projections for the future envisioned in the past. Her translation processes between sound, words, patterns, and machines create discursive associations and reveal logics of thinking.
Some of her early works took advantage of the language of embroidery to challenge stereotypical images of gender (Gordas, 2002), subverting notions of power within the private and public spheres (Kaunas Graffiti, 2009), or to rekindle what seemed to be lifeless or submissive (La Constancia dormida, 2006). Likewise, her work with embroidery proposes a new insight into the architectural representation of space (From Floor Plans to Confection Patterns: Apartment Houses in New York City, 1900–1914, 2010). As such, her work established a relationship with architecture that would have consequences later in her career.

The use of embroidery as a language also intersects with the production of narratives (Tales and Other Nightmares,2009); the thread materializes the existence and the power of the line as containment of meaning, generating shapes and functioning as symbols transformed into text, allowing a multiplicity of meanings to occur between the image and the word. Written language from its minimum particles to literary narrative, as well as its oral tradition (Refranes, 2008; Otros paseos. Otras historias, 2010), has been the starting point for many projects during her career.
Candiani started exploring the possibilities of technology enabling her to continue her research on time (Plataforma Sonora,2012), embroidery, sound (Sobre el Tiempo, 2008), and narrative (Leer de corrido, 2010).

In 2011, Candiani received a Guggenheim Fellowship and in 2013, the Award of Distinction by the Prix Ars Electronica, in the category of Hybrid Arts. Since 2012 she has been a member of the National System of Art Creators, Mexico. She has participated in several artist-in-residence programs including in Poland, United Kingdom, Austria, USA, Colombia, Russia, Spain, Argentina, Slovenia, Japan, Egypt, and Lithuania.

Statement

My research processes take as starting point language, text, the political implications of the domestic, of what is public and private, and of “the others.”
Translate strategies amongst systems –linguistic, visual, phonic– and practices, generates equivalences and associations, where there is a constant nostalgia for the obsolete, that makes me consider the discursive content of artifacts and on the former projections of future. In this quest, I have gathered interdisciplinary work teams that contribute from their diverse knowledge fields and specific skills to archive poetic intersections amongst art and technology.

Textiles have been present in my work as tailoring, as a narrative resource and as labor, socially embedded with meaning. Tailoring as design is a contact point with architecture, where the space distribution of the plans as sewing patterns re-signifying the idea of inhabited space or the utopia of an space that could be inhabited.

My creative processes continue linked with language, and my intention is increasingly oriented towards the materiality of sound, the idea of the automaton, the possibilities of mechanisms and the sensible experience with architecture.

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Tania Candiani is a Guggenheim scholarship fellow in the Creative Arts category and she is part of the Mexican National System of Creators since 2012.